I grew up a Yankee fan, I favor Pitchers whenever possible, I am a stathead, and my dream job is to be a GM for an MLB franchise. In the summer, I go to MLB games and catch baseballs. In the winter, I write about what teams are doing to get better or worse. I try to be positive and unbiased in my writing, but that isn't always possible when evaluating teams truthfully.

8/1/11 Marlins at Mets: Citi Field

Another nice and sunny day at Citi Field, right?:

Wrong!:

Suffice to say it wasn’t looking good for batting practice and I was, at this moment, resigned to the fact I wasn’t going to have a full batting practice, if any.

When I got in, there was good news and there was bad news.

Good News: There was batting practice.

Bad News: Season ticket holders were on the field:

This meant I probably wasn’t going to get a toss-up in Left Field during Mets bp and that would mean I would have to get a quick ball hit to me to keep me in rhythm that is so important whenever I am at Citi Field because I move around so much for toss-ups.

Let’s just say this was the highlight of my day to that point:

That would be a picture of the Mets leaving the field. Why was it the highlight? Well, it meant that the section of fans in front of the Left Field stands would be leaving. This meant that I could put on my Marlins gear and be ignored by them instead of the Mets. I had a few close calls on hit balls but I’ll save you the useless information and just tell you about the closest of calls. Here is the diagram that shows what happened:

John Buck of the Marlins hit a Home Run right to my row. I had made sure there was no one I could run into in my row and so I just tracked the ball. I drifted over to where I could catch the ball and I reached up for the ball. Just as I did this, I saw a glove coming up and backwards. You see that man in the white? He jumped backwards nto my row because the ball was highish and he wasn’t going to catch the ball by jumping upwards (the path of the ball is shown by the white streak in the picture) his glove first hit mine and then his body bumped back into me and the ball bounced off of his glove and into the aisle. What then happened then was that he gave me about a tenth degree stare for costing him the ball as I told him I was sorry even though I hadn’t reached forward at all.

I went this way and went that way but just nothing was going my way. I finally went to Center Field for my third time on the day and just every Marlins player was completely ignoring my request I don’t know if it was part of what kids week (this week the Mets were letting in 3 kids 12 and under free for every paying adult) or if it was the general noise of New York but none of the players even tried to throw in my direction. It was 6:15 and I was getting worried about being shutout. Finally, at 6:18, Burke Badenhop threw a ball to a family in front of me:

The ball sailed over both the family and my heads and landed in the row behind me. I grabbed the ball but at the same time a lady came running in that row and grabbed onto my hand. She then started to try and pull the ball from my grasp as she simultaneously rubbed my hand against the coarse cement. I then, pulled my hand out and handed the ball to the girl of that family. The lady then apologized as she was trying to get the ball for them as well. As a result of this scrapping, my hand was pretty scuffed up:

You really see much because this picture was taken an hour later but my skin was peeled and I chipped the nail you can see of my middle finger. I know it probably would have been easy to avoid aggravating it but idiot me kept putting my hand in and taking it out of my pockets because all of my important things were on my right side and so I kept hurting it.

Normally, I would take a seat behind the dugout but decided not to on this. Due to the fact that I had luckily gotten 1 ball during batting practice, I knew 1 or even 2 balls from behind the dugout wasn’t going to help my day. So I set up camp a bit further from Home Plate:

Through the fifth inning, the only thing that came close was a Mike Stanton liner a few sections above. Then, in the bottom of the sixth, Angel Pagan sliced a liner to my left. It was going pretty fast so I went to the spot I thought it would hit down. I turned around three feet before that and just saw/heard the ball whizz two feet past my head and hit in a seat in front of me. There, I picked the ball up from the folded seat. I actually found out that I don’t have any pictures I could have used for diagrams or showing you where I ran.

So, my path was a mini z shape because of the railing. I ran a few feet to my left, went down a few stairs and then continued to my left. So imagine the place where I picked the ball up as the upper left part of the z. Anyway, a good ending to a frustrating day. Too bad this frustration has now extended over two weeks.

Here is a picture that I took of the ball after the game:

I didn’t get anything after the game but I was satisfied that my stategery paid off when it counted.

STATS:

2 balls at this game ( 1 pictured because I gave 1 away)

this ball doesn’t have any because up to this point I haven’t numbered foul balls but they are #s 83-84 for my career:

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Cook & Sons' Baseball Adventures
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Hit Tracker
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Steel City Ballhawk
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MLBlogs I Recommend and Follow

Ballparks on a Budget
Ever want to go to a baseball game outside of your local team but don’t want to empty the bank? Alicia Barnhart’s your girl with Ballparks on a Budget. She should know how to spend wisely in going to games because, well, she’s been to them all. Just last

Dodger Blue World
Just a great blog written by dedicated Dodger super-fan Emma Amaya.

Minoring In Baseball
A blog written by the father of just a family who are all fans of the West Michigan Whitecaps who is just a great guy in general: Michael David.

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As the title kind of suggests, this blog is pretty much the center of the MLBlogs unvierse. It apply sometimes goes by the moniker: “MLBlogosphere”

The Ballpark Guide
A MUST-read for any MiLB afficionados, or even many MLB fans. Malcolm MacMillan goes to different ballparks all over and details his visit on the blog and writes tips for anyone going to that ballpark on his website (which can be found on the blog’s homep

The Next White Sox GM
If you were a baseball mind growing up, you may have gotten a comment from an elder female family member (usually grandma) saying, “You should be the one to run the team with all the knowledge you’ve got about baseball.” Well, here’s a kid who might just

The Unbiased MLB Fan
Matt Huddleston doesn’t root for the teams; he roots for the players. I wish I could say more, but I suspect any other explanation of his blog would be a multi-centennial-word ordeal.

Three Up, Three Down
One would assume not getting into the MLB Fan Cave is a sad experience. (Well, at least I would; I’ve never been old enough to apply.) However, this group of fans turned that usually-sad experience and turned it into a great blog where there are just a sl

MLBlogs I Recommend

Observing Baseball Classics

"The Baseball" Book Review
In this entry I reviewed/summarized the entirety of the book “The Baseball: Stunts, Scandals, and Secrets Beneath the Stitches” written by Zack Hample.

10/19/10 ALCS: Yankee Stadium
Sure I had no clue how to write it, but this was my first ballhawking entry ever and my only of 2010, so it falls under the category “classic”

Ballhawk Charities 2012
Where I went over the four ballhawk charities I had heard of at the beginning of the season as a way of helping them out by getting the word out.

Case Study on Morality in Baseball
A research paper I did way back in the summer of 2010. I don’t necessarily agree with everything I wrote back then anymore, but it does add an interesting perspective to things especially in today’s steroid talk.

Collected Baseball Knick-knacks
Quite simply: pretty much everything baseball-related that I had collected and managed to keep ahold of as of November, 20, 2011.

Dissecting/Deconstructing Baseballs
I’ve taken apart several baseballs before, and it was fun, so I decided to make a video of me taking apart a baseball and adding tips for other people to do so too.

Favorite MLB Players
I did probably one of my funner videos on who my favorite players were from the present day, when I first started watching baseball, and my favorite player that I never saw play at all.

Houlihan Park Tour and Snagging Analysis
This is my high school, Fordham Prep,’s home field, which being the manager of the varsity team for three years, I spent proabably more games here than at any other baseball field. So when I returned to my high school for a day, I took a quick tour of the

Observing Baseball Trivia
See the description of the link two links above, but modify it slightly so it fits this entry’s title.

Pitching Aces in the Playoffs
My first ever “real” entry that I ever wrote back on the surplus of star pitchers in the 2010 playoffs. It was pretty good considering I knew nothing about blogging, or writing in general for that matter.

Pure Genius
This is just me explaining how the Phillies got three aces of pitchers; nothing fancy. But it was me showing my first flash of general manager mind to the world, so that’s why I like it.

Sabermetrics (the explanation)
This was me explaining some simple sabermetric statistics for the people of the world who have heard of the stats but never really knew what significance they had/have over the more common metrics. I take pride in this because it can potentially educate s

Survey of Adults Perception of Baseball
I surveyed a bunch of my teacher as to which baseball player was there favorite; both in and outside of New York. It’s a bit more complex than that, but the only way to understand is to read the entry.

Tour Target Field in the Snow
Target Field is in Minnesota, so it only felt fitting that I should take at least one day to tour it while it was buried in the snow. And that’s what this entry was: a video of me going around Target Field while it was snowing and there was a ton of snow

Weird Observing Baseball Facts and Records
I may yet do this every year…and it would then become its own link category–but for the meantime–there is only one set of Observing Baseball Facts and Records, so it definitely goes under “Observing Baseball Classics”.

Blast from the Baseball Past

8/24/08 Dodgers at Phillies: Citizens Bank Park
My second ever game to CBP that ended with Pedro Feliz hitting a three-run walk-off home run while my dad and I were in the car because we had to catch a flight to Detroit seven hours later that same day in New York.

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